


Kivuli

by MonstrousRegiment



Series: Usiku [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 05:22:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonstrousRegiment/pseuds/MonstrousRegiment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A moment past midnight. The witching hour. </p>
<p>Something is calling to Charles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kivuli

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzomesI7p31r5x58so1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ6IHWSU3BX3X7X3Q&Expires=1332262287&Signature=lTrbro816SmQjY%2F7qvZOrhFRjoY%3D
> 
> ...i need to learn to link stuff in AO3.

A moment past midnight. The witching hour. 

Erik sits on a chair by the window beneath the moonlight, a knife in his hands, the blade shifting and re-shaping; here it’s a butcher’s knife, here is a scalpel. The grinding of the metal bending to accommodate his will soothes him. 

A flicker of awareness, and in a room a floor upstairs an in a different wing he feels Charles wake up. The trepidation eating away at the edges of Charles’ mind sticks in Erik’s throat. His fingers don’t clench; he twists the knife in the air, re-shapes it into a dagger, into a bastard blade, thin and brittle and too long. Balls it up into a bullet, flattens it out into a tray. 

At the other end of the bond Charles’ mind is choking on memory, clouded by mists and clawing hands, horrors half-remembered. 

Erik is an old creature, so old he scarcely remembers how he began existing, only knows there was nothing and then there was life, back at the beginnings of this age of the world. There is another shape that is Erik, Erikir, a shape not like a human, that he hides beneath enchantments braided deep enough he’d need years to disentangle them. 

The Thirteenth told him once that Erik was a creature of death, darkness given shape. Beautiful like a broken thing, birthed out of a dying star. 

Erik thinks he might have been human, at some point, a distant memory, blurred sensations. 

Charles never tells Erik he thinks he’s beautiful. There’s something different between them that doesn’t need the words, something deeper even than the magic that binds them, something Erik can only just half understand. It makes him give Charles a freedom he never gave any other bonded companion. Charles is _his_ , but he is not Erik’s _possession_. 

Erik is old, and patient. He knows Charles will come to him, just as Charles always comes to him, like a tall ship to a lighthouse. 

The first time Erik had met Charles, the mutant had been a toddler, a fragile, small child of too-big eyes with a too-sharp mind. Erik had recently broken free of Shaw, and he was a mass of seething rage to great to know direction. He’d dragged himself to the nearest Usiku agent he’d been able to find through the folds of the dimensions, and collapsed in their doorstep a beggar. 

It had been midnight. 

As Brian Xavier bent down and unceremoniously gathered Erik’s wasted husk into his arms, lifting him, Sharon had asked gentle questions. She needed to know who he was and how to help him. But Erik, mind half-gone with pain and imprisonment, sliding slowly into madness in a steep downwards glide finding no hand-holds, had been unable to do anything but stare at the vein in her neck. 

“He’s a vampyr,” a small little voice had answered. Erik had allowed his head to roll to the side. 

A small toddler-child, skin pale and eyes vivid blue in the darkness of the hall. 

The Xaviers had made the necessary preparations, and soon Erik found himself in a light-tight vault, fed with fresh blood. The memory was a blur, and Erik hated not remembering, but he knew Brian had stayed with him the long night, a steady calm presence in the corner of the vault with a book. 

Erik had woken the next night, somewhat better, to find the toddler-child standing at his bedside, looking curiously at his hand. Surely it made quite an impression; Erik had been skin sticking to bone, a skeleton with fever-bright eyes and the jaws of a wolf, exquisitely out of control. 

He’d moved his hands, and the boy had looked up, blue eyes too sharp by half. 

“Fear not, little one,” Erik had managed, his human tongue slow. 

“I’m not scared,” the child had replied, and wrapped his small warm fingers around the skeleton-thin hand. 

And so Erik had waited, for Charles to grow. For Charles to _want_. 

He waits now like he’s always waiting. Charles will come to him, he knows. 

Sure enough, moments later, Charles steps into the sitting room, dressed in a shirt and jeans and looking oddly young for it. Charles has, of course, given up all semblance of a normal human life; even if Erik did not insist he drink his blood he would live longer than any mortal just because he is bonded to Erik. He has not yet come to the full shape of his adulthood; he is thin and slender, not quite settled into his broad shoulders and strong bones. 

Erik will wait. Sooner or later Charles will take his blood and become his equal. There is yet time. 

“You are troubled, little one,” he says, plunging the knife into the wood of the table. “I would know what ails you. Perhaps even I might slay it.”

Charles pushes sweat-damp hair from his brow and leans his hip against the table, just out of reach. Erik scents the air; Charles smells of fear and fatigue. He has a strong headache, strong enough he can’t quite hide it from Erik, as he normally does. 

“I don’t know that you can slay it, my friend.”

Erik arches his brows. “What a novelty. I haven’t yet met a single creature I could not.”

Charles rubs his forehead with the tips of his fingers, slow with tiredness. Seeing him like this is distasteful to Erik; his godling, in pain. But Charles is troubled, mind shrouded in mists of nightmare, and Erik knows the frailty of these nights, these moments when he is truly in danger of losing the mortal to things not even he can save him from. 

The combined gifts of his parents have given Charles an uncannily strong mutation, a rare thing amongst mortals. The more powerful it makes him the more easily he falls prey to the reaching claws of the Underworld, and though none would dare defy Erik to _steal_ the man, they would certainly attempt to ruin him. 

Erik reaches out a hand and waits for Charles to take it, palm against palm. Bone and muscle and sinew; Charles is startlingly solid sometimes, like a wisp of a dream made flesh. Erik never forgets that Charles is more than his body, so much more than the flesh that contains him. He would make him even more, if Charles only stopped being stubborn. 

But stubbornness, as it turns out, is simply another Xavier inheritance. Brian had been as shrewd as he was gentle. 

“They do not call me the Sword for nothing, loved one. Surely I can handle whatever brings your night terrors.” 

Charles gives him an even, level look. 

“Something calls to me,” he says carefully, watching for reaction. “from beyond the Gates.”

Erik’s jaw grinds. 

“I thought I told you to stay away from that, Charles.”

“You did, and as you are well aware, I am no medium. But—something is _calling_ me, Erik.”

“Turn it away.”

“I did not turn _you_ away, my friend,” Charles chastises softly. 

“ _I_ was not flung to the Abyss,” Erik replies tightly. 

“Only just barely,” Charles says, without flinching. Erik _hates_ being reminded how close he came to becoming a destroyer of world, a creature without control or consciousness. But it is what it is, and Charles isn’t as willing to forget as Erik himself. 

“All manner of disgusting creatures are bound there,” Erik grinds out, tensing in anger—all but his hand, which still holds Charles’ fragile fingers. “Think you I will lead you to their claws, sit you out like a snack to be destroyed? _Turn it away_.” 

“Erik, this creature has a _mind_ ,” Charles, never to be deterred from his objectives, even by the furious rage of an Ancient, continued calmly. “It can think, it knows where it is, it is in pain.” 

“A pain it deserves.”

Charles considers his next words carefully. Erik is one of the Seven, and has of course every right to sentence the doomed to the Abyss, or to return them from it. But Erik has the mind of an ancient creature, and for all of the ways he’s adapted to the human world, he still has the idiosyncrasies of ages gone by. He’ll not easily consider revoking a sentence to the Abyss, even for Charles. 

“It’ll not leave me alone. I’m not asking you to free it; only to take me there and let it have its piece. Perhaps if only it is heard, it will rest.”

“It is not meant to be resting,” Erik argues. “It is meant to be suffering for all of eternity and the remaking of the world. You know the kind of creatures that lurk there, Charles. Star devourers, destroyers of worlds, sun-snuffers. Each and every one is a child of chaos. Monsters all.”

“Arguably you are a child of chaos yourself.” 

“I keep myself in check,” Erik points out. “Otherwise the Thirteenth would have ripped me to shreds long ago, as you well know. I am in control.”

“I am only saying, my love, that just as you were able to bring yourself back from the edge, another creature might similarly remember itself. Who’s to say even in the void of the Abyss one can’t have some time to reconsider one’s life choices? For all you know that’s _all_ they’re doing there, hanging in the void for eternity.”

Erik’s jaw is set, but he is thinking. 

“You will not sleep another night until I do this for you,” he says at length, voice flat. 

The lengths to which he will take himself for Charles don’t always amuse him. He rises from the chair, towering over the mortal, eyes star-bright, swirling in anger. Beneath the surface of his skin the darkness ripples, seething. His eyes invert, and then change back, pupil and iris and white. He holds himself in check; lets the anger bleed away. 

He will not hurt Charles; he will destroy the world before hurting Charles. 

But he is angry, _so_ angry, and Charles—sweet, fragile Charles with his delicate bones and his pale pliant skin, so easy to break—merely looks at him, unafraid. 

“I will give you passage,” Erik says quietly, something terrible shifting inside him. “But you will pay me for it, lover.” 

Charles continues to look at him, steady and calm. Sometimes Erik wishes he could break him down and see the core of him, the pulsing bright light that makes Charles _Charles_. But then he’d have nothing but a ruined thing. He wants to break Charles, but he doesn’t want him to change, to be broken. The impulse is easy to discard. 

“Name your price,” Charles says steadily. His trust in Erik is at the same time infuriating and intoxicating. 

“You will have my blood,” Erik murmurs, settling his hands on the table at either side of Charles’ hips. “A mouthful, lover, and you will swallow it whole.” 

A mouthful of blood; fifty years of life. 

Charles’ jaw worked. 

“That’s rather a steep toll, Erik.”

“Take it or leave it as you please,” the Ancient says dismissively, shifting closer so he’s pressing Charles back against the table, nosing his neck right behind his ear. A sweet-spot for Charles. “It is not _I_ who wants to go to the Gates. We might yet stay, and do—other things.” 

He brings his right hand up from the wood of the table to slide up beneath the fabric of Charles’ shirt, to the small of his back. The mortal’s skin is hot against his own cool one, smooth and unblemished. He dips his fingertips teasingly under the waistband of the jeans, only an inch, barely a suggestion. 

“A mouthful, then,” Charles sighs, relaxing into Erik’s arms. Erik smiles, slow and dangerous, against the skin of his neck.

Keeping the hand on Charles’ back where it is, the vampyr slides the other up to the back of Charles’ neck, and presses a swift chaste kiss to the mortal’s lips. 

“I do so like it when you give in,” he murmurs, pressing flush against Charles’ front. 

“It’s not like you give me much of a choice, love,” Charles replies, but there is no bite in it. Charles had given up hope for a normal life; he’s as tied to Erik as Erik is tied to him, and will float or sink with him. 

Instead of replying to that, Erik licks into his mouth, making the kiss slow and filthy, all the better for Charles to melt against him, to relax. Erik has uncanny control over himself, and doesn’t need to relax into vampyr form to elongate his canines enough to slice his tongue open. Charles’ hands clench on his shirt at the taste, but he dutifully waits until his mouth is full of the rich, thick liquid, before swallowing. He coughs slightly, working his throat to down the rest of it clinging to it. Erik kisses him again, chasing the taste in Charles’ tongue, crushing him against the table. He swallows Charles’ moan with a rumble of content. 

“Oh, enough,” Charles pants, breaking the kiss. He swallows again and Erik ducks down to lick Charles’ throat, clutching the mutant close. “Erik, that’s enough—oh— _no_.” 

Using his telepathy like a spear, Charles makes Erik flinch away. 

“I’ve paid your price,” the mutant says, arching a brow. “Don’t be a twat.” 

Erik grins. “I love it when you talk dirty to me. Even if your repertoire leaves much to be desired.”

With a long inhale of Charles’ scent, infused now with his own, Erik straightens and steps back. 

“Come along, then,” he says, offering his hand for Charles to take, even as he summons his long red cape to wrap around them. 

The glide through dimensions like water through widespread fingers. A gift from the Thirteenth, a rare boon; Erik doesn’t have to struggle with the fabric of time and space to move; he needs merely a desire to be elsewhere. 

They materialize in front of the Gates. 

The Abyss is not a place. It is a non-place, a spot between dimensions, the blade-thin space between one fold of time and the next. A void, non-existence. The Thirteenth had once brought Erik here, when Erik was still Erikir and the world was new, and had shown him the wards and chains. Then it had said, _Here are my children, bound by that which is no longer me, as in the past. I twice-folded and separated and he became another._

Erikir had asked how long the Children would be there. 

_Until the world starts anew, and I slay the sun_ , the Thirteenth had answered, and then left. Erikir hadn’t understood, then, why the Thirteenth had shown him the wards at all. It wasn’t until many centuries later than Erik had enough power to open the Gates and cast the unwanted to the depths of the void. 

Now, he wonders. 

“Oh,” is all Charles says, looking around. 

They are in a great barren wasteland, ice beneath their feet and fog around them. In front of them stand two tall columns of stone blacker than moonless night, its intricate carvings sucking power out of the world. An anchor and a door. Between them there is nothing, but walk past them and you are lost. 

Time and space have only a tenuous grasp here, and sight drags. The fog licks at the red of the cape and makes the color bleed to the air, like the thick smoke of a cigar, like the cloud of a drop of ink in water.

Erik slides his arms around Charles, pressing them chest to back. 

“Come forth, then,” he calls out, to the fog and the ice and the void. 

It takes a moment before the shape defines itself beyond the columns of the Gates, a huge grey-blue thing of long fur and glowing chain-marks on its neck and paws. Its eyes glow red as fresh-spilled arterial blood. 

Charles is unafraid. 

“You’ve been calling,” he says, calm. “I’d like to know what business you have with me.”

_What business would I have, but that of making myself free?_ The wolf sends, and oh, Erik knew him now. 

“Star-devourer,” he says quietly, frowning. “Fenrir.”

_A long time since I went by that name, Erikir of the Seven Sworn._

“A long time since _I_ went by _that_ name.”

_Indeed. I would be free, vampyr._

“If wishes were stars,” Erik sneers. 

_Oh, but they are, boy-child. And they taste so well, like the death of worlds—a taste I know you’ve on your tongue._

The wolf settled down and sat, shaking the mane of tangled fur around its neck. 

_I grow bored of the void, vampyr. Your mortal is easy to reach in his sleep. I meant no disrespect in reaching out for him, and if I’ve offended you I offer retribution._

This brings Erik up short. 

“What is it you offer?” Charles asks, politely curious. 

_I would have a life of enslavement upon the world, rather than an eternity of drifting in emptiness. If I am to be bound, I would rather be bound to you, Erikir. I give you my loyalty and my will, and you in exchange will give me my freedom._

Erik considers this. 

Fenrir Star-Snuffer, destroyer of worlds, at his beck and call. 

Well, there really is no chance he will decline this. 

“Hm. Then I will give you your duty now, and have you sworn to it before I release you, Fenrir.”

_Speak it._

“You will keep my companion safe as I slumber in the daylight. It is him, after all, whom you disturbed with your whining.” 

Charles knows better than to speak up against him in the presence of another Ancient, but by the way he stiffens Erik knows they will be having words about this later, in privacy. Charles values his freedom in the way only someone who knows it can be taken from him can. He loves Erik, but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of realizing he’ll never be free of him. He chafes against restraints, his godling. Even Erik’s. His love of freedom is one of the things Erik loves most about him; an urge to be free almost as strong as Erik’s. 

They are each other’s ball and chain, but because they are each other, it doesn’t hurt. 

_A guard dog for your pet, Fenrir sends, amused. Yes. I will have that fate. I will swear myself to it, Erikir._

Erik disentangles himself from Charles, leaving him his cape, and goes to the columns of the Gate. Without a second of hesitation, he spills his blood on the markings of the column, and watched the stone soak up the blood like hungry, barren earth sucking water. 

A wisp of a thought, the voice of the Thirteenth: _Yes, Erikir. You may have him._

The wards part open, and the chain-seals in Fenrir’s throat and paws fade into the fur. The great wolf saunters out of the Abyss, content as a pup, and without preamble throws himself at Charles’ feet, nosing his right hand open. When Charles strokes his massive snout, Fenrir snorts in pleasure. A moment later, he catches fire, burns out. When the flames die out, what’s left behind is a man kneeling on the floor, tall and broad, covered in coarse body hair in the way of human males. His naked form is pleasant enough to look at.

When Charles gestures for him to rise, elegant and regal as a prince—which he is—the man does so. He is tall, not as tall as Erik’s human form, but taller certainly than his new charge. 

“Once upon a time I went by the name Logan,” the man says. “In one of the cycles of the world, I was briefly human.” 

“Logan, then,” Charles smiles, seemingly undisturbed by having just acquired an Abyssal creature to shadow his steps in daylight. Oh, they _will_ be having words later, he and Erik. “It is a pleasure to meet you, my friend. Shall we head home?”

“You have a nice scent,” Logan rumbles, pressing himself close enough to Charles to feel his skin through the fabric of the clothes he’s wearing. He ducks his head and sniffs his neck, hands wrapping around Charles’ slender arms. 

Erik prepares to banish him again. 

“That’s nice, I get that a lot,” Charles intones, tone flat. “If you will step back, please, there’s a lad.”

These are the moments Erik would kneel down at Charles’ feet and beg. It’s at times like these, where Charles is bigger than dying stars, that Erik knows he did well in shackling himself to the mortal. Someday Charles will take his gift and join him in as an equal and oh, he will be _splendid_. 

Logan steps back and laughs and laughs and laughs. 

And so it is they return to Xavier Manor, and dump Logan in a guest room, with some difficulty given the wolf’s justified fascination with the man, and a moment later Erik is pressing Charles down onto his own bed and undressing him. 

“You don’t play fair, Erik,” Charles says, voice tight. 

The vampyr laughs against his lips, hands busy with Charles’ belt. “There are no rules in this long game, my love.”

“I’m really not happy with your right now,” Charles warns, though he can’t help but arch up when Erik settles between his legs, skin to skin. Erik likes having Charles like this, crushed against the bed and trapped underneath him, as close as they can physically get without Erik shredding his skin and climbing into the spaces between the man’s bones, travelling with his blood across his many veins. 

Erik shifts closer and in, catches Charles’ breathy little gasp in his own mouth, tangles his long finger’s in Charles’ dark hair, damp with building sweat. 

Against Charles’ open mouth he murmurs, “You have fifty more years to hate me for it.”

“Oh,” Charles pulls Erik’s hair, hard enough to bend his head back and get his lips away from his own neck. Erik lets him. “you _twat_.”


End file.
